“There was a morning when our son asked for a glass of milk and I knew I didn’t have any to give him,” says Erica Lacerda de Souza. “All we had left to eat in the house was rice and farinha [toasted manioc flour]. That’s not enough for a child.”
The 32-year-old Brazilian and her husband, Bruce Lee Sousa, 28, had already sold both of their cars and closed their bodega because of pandemic regulations when they sent their son Henrique, then 6 years old, to live with his maternal grandmother in the east end of São Paulo.
Bills were piling up and the couple’s other work — hers as a cleaner and his at a carwash — wasn’t enough. When the pandemic shut down the carwash where Lee Sousa worked too they lost the house they rented and almost everything in it.
With a few changes of clothes in a backpack and nowhere to go, the two ended up living at São Paulo’s downtown Barra Funda Terminal. They hoped sleeping on the floor of the busy station — a massive central hub for the city’s buses, subways and trains — would be safer than staying on the streets.
That was in July 2020.
Three years later, their life has had a remarkable turnaround. For the past six months, Lacerda de Souza and Lee Sousa have lived with their son in a tiny home. They’re one of 37 families in the Anhangabaú neighborhood to benefit from a new program in São Paulo called Vila Reencontro. It’s one of the ways this city of 12 million is trying to help its rising number of unhoused people — an estimated 53,000 in March of this year, up from 44,300 in 2019 and 48,600 last year.
The tiny houses of São Paulo are part of a global effort to address the critical issue of finding homes for those who, because of the pandemic and other economic factors, are among the more than 150 million unhoused people around the world.
Vila Reencontro is one of two programs in São Paulo that started during the pandemic to keep people housed as inflation and unemployment spiked. The other — called Morar Primeiro, or…
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